The Garden of Branching Paths

To Victoria Ocampo

In his History of the World War (page 252), Liddell
Hart writes that an assault on the Serre-Montauban
line intended for the twenty-fourth of July, 1916, and
consisting of thirteen British divisions supported by
fourteen hundred guns, had to be postponed until
the morning of the twenty-ninth. The cause of this
otherwise inconsequential delay, he goes on, was
torrential rain. The following statement, dictated,
checked, and signed by Dr Yu Tsun, one-time head
of English at the Tsingtao Hochschule, throws
new light on the event. The first two pages are
missing.

*

... and replaced the receiver. Immediately afterwards,
I realized I knew the voice, which had answered in
German. It was that of Captain Richard Madden.
Madden speaking from Viktor Runeberg's flat
meant the end of all our efforts and - but this seemed, or should have seemed, quite secondary - of our lives as well. It meant that Runeberg had
been arrested, or killed.* Before the sun set that
day, I would suffer the same fate. Madden was
implacable. Or, rather, he felt bound to be implacable.
An Irishman in the service of England, a man
accused of half-heartedness and even treason, how
could he fail to welcome and seize upon such a
miraculous gift - the discovery, capture, and perhaps
death as well, of two agents of the German
Empire?

I went up to my room; absurdly, I locked the
door and threw myself down on the narrow iron
bedstead. Outside the window were the usual slate
roofs and an overcast six o'clock evening sky. It
was hard to believe that this unremarkable day,
without an omen, without a warning, was to be
the day of my inescapable death. Despite my dead
father, despite having been a child in one of Hai
Feng's symmetrical gardens, was I about to die? I
then reflected that everything that happens does
so only to oneself and only now. Centuries of centuries
pass, but events take place only in the present; countless men are battling in the air, on land, and
at sea, yet all that really happens is happening
to me.

The almost unbearable memory of Madden's
horse-like face put and end to these ramblings. In
the depths of my hatred and fear (now that I have
outwitted Richard Madden, now that my neck
yearns for the noose, I can admit my fear), I realized
that this troublesome and doubtless happy warrior
had no idea that I possessed the secret - the name
of the place on the Ancre where the new British
artillery depot was located. A bird streaked across
the grey sky, and automatically I converted it into
an aeroplane and that aeroplane into many - over
France - demolishing the depot with a rain of
bombs. If only, before a bullet silenced my mouth,
I could shout out the name of that place so that it
could be heard in Germany! But a human voice is
feeble. How could I make mine reach my commander's
ears? The ears of that warped, loathsome
man, who knew nothing of Runeberg or me except
that we were in Staffordshire but who, in his drab
Berlin office, was poring over endless newspapers,
vainly awaiting information from us.

'I must get out of here,' I said aloud. Without
making a sound, I stood up. It was a pointless perfection
of silence, as if Madden were about to pounce. Something - perhaps the simple need to
confirm that my resources were nil - made me go
through my pockets. I found what I knew would
be there. My American watch; a nickel-plated chain
and square coin; a key-ring with the useless but
compromising keys to Runeberg's flat; my notebook;
a letter I decided to destroy at once (and
didn't); a crown, two shillings, and a few pence;
my blue-and-red pencil; a handkerchief; my revolver
with a single bullet. Foolishly, I picked it up
and, to bolster my courage, weighed it in my hand.
A gunshot can be heard from some distance, I
vaguely judged. Ten minutes later, my plan was
ripe. The telephone directory gave me the name of
the one person who could transmit my message.
He lived out in the suburbs, in Fenton, less than
half an hour away by train.

I am a coward. I now confess it, now that I
have carried out a plan which was nothing if not
risky. I know it was a terrible thing to do. I certainly
did not do it for Germany. I care nothing
for a barbaric country that forced me into the
ignominy of spying. What is more, I now know of
an Englishman - a modest man - who in my view
is Goethe's equal. I only spoke to him for an hour,
but for that hour he was Goethe. I did the deed
because I felt my commander had little regard for men of my race - for my numerous ancestors, who
unite in me. I wanted to prove to him that a yellow
man could save his armies. Meanwhile, I had to
get away from Captain Madden. At any moment
his hand and his voice could sound at my door. I
dressed quietly, bade myself farewell in the mirror,
went downstairs, peered along the empty street,
and slipped out. The station was only a short distance
away, but I thought it best to take a taxi.
That way, I told myself, I would run less risk of
being spotted. As it was, in the deserted street I
felt utterly visible and defenceless. I remember
telling the driver to stop just before he reached the
entrance. I alighted with deliberate, almost painful,
slowness. My destination was the village of
Ashgrove, but I bought a ticket for a station farther
along the line.

The train was due to leave in a minute or two - at
eight fifty. I quickened my step; the next train
would arrive at nine-thirty. There was hardly anyone
on the platform. Boarding, I made my way
along the corridor. I remember some farmworkers,
a woman in mourning, a youth engrossed in
Tacitus's Annals, a wounded but happy soldier.
Finally, we moved off. A man I recognized came
dashing, too late, onto the platform. It was Captain
Richard Madden. Devastated, trembling, I shrank down in my seat, pulling away from the fearful
window.

My devastation changed to a state of almost
abject bliss. I told myself that I had already crossed
swords and had scored the first hit by eluding, if
only for forty minutes, if only by a stroke of luck,
my adversary's attack. This small triumph, I argued,
foreshadowed total victory. Nor was it such
a small triumph, since without the precious advantage
afforded me by the train timetable I would be
in prison or dead. I argued (no less falsely) that my
cowardly joy proved I was a man who could bring
the assignment to a successful end. Out of my weakness,
I drew a strength that did not let me down. I
foresee that man will daily give in to ever more
hideous deeds, and that soon there will be no one
but warriors and bandits. I give them this advice:
To perform a hideous deed, a man must tell himself
that he has already done it; he must force upon himself
a future as irrevocable as the past. This I did,
as my eyes - those of a man already dead - took in
the passing of that day and the gathering of the
night. The train ran smoothly past a copse of ash
trees, coming to a halt in what seemed open countryside.
No one called out the name of the station.

'Ashgrove?' I asked some boys outside the window.

'Ashgrove,' they replied.

'I got down. A street lamp lit up the platform,
but the boys' faces remained in shadow.

'Are you going to Dr Albert's house?' one of
them asked.

Before I could reply, another said, 'It's a good
distance from here, but if you take the first road
on the left and then left again at each turning, you
can't go wrong.'

I tossed them a coin (my last), made my way
down some stone steps, and set off along the lonely
road. It descended slowly, its surface unmade.
Branches met overhead, and a low full moon
seemed to keep company with me.

For a moment, I thought that Richard Madden
had somehow fathomed my desperate plan, but
soon I realized this was impossible. It occurred to
me that the advice to keep taking a left turn was
the normal way to reach the central point of certain
mazes. I know something about labyrinths.
Not for nothing am I the great-grandson of the
famous Ts'ui Pên, who was governor of Yunnan
and who renounced office in order to write a novel
that teemed with more characters than the Hung
Lu Meng and to construct a maze in which all
mankind might lose its way. Thirteen years he dedicated
to these diverse labours, but a stranger's hand struck him down, and his novel proved meaningless
and no one ever found the maze.

Under English trees I contemplated that lost
labyrinth, imagining it pristine and inviolate in a
mountain fastness. I imagined it obliterated by
paddies or under water; I pictured it endless, no
longer consisting of octagonal pavilions and of
paths that turn back on themselves but of rivers
and provinces and kingdoms. I thought of a labyrinth
of labyrinths, of a meandering, ever-growing
labyrinth that would encompass the past and future
and would somehow take in the heavenly
bodies. Absorbed in these imaginings, I forgot my
predicament as a hunted man. For untold moments,
I felt I was a detached observer of the world.
The living, twilit fields, the moon, the remains of
the evening were playing on me; as was the easy
slope of the road, which removed any chance of
tiring. The evening was intimate, infinite. The road
descended and branched across now shadowy pastures.
A high-pitched, almost syllabic music drifted
in, blurred by leaves and distance, and then moved
off on wafting breezes. I reflected that a man can
be an enemy of other men, of other moments of
other men, but not of a country - not of fireflies,
words, gardens, waterways, sunsets.

I came to a high, rusty gate. Through its bars I made out an avenue and a sort of pavilion. At once,
I grasped two things. The first was trivial, the second
almost beyond belief. The music came from
the pavilion, and the music was Chinese. This was
why I had accepted it, without paying it any special
heed. I do not remember whether there was a bellpull
or a button or whether I called by clapping
my hands. The scratchy music went on.

From the inner depths of the house came a light,
whose beam the trees intersected and sometimes
blotted out. Shaped like a drum, the paper lantern
was the colour of the moon. It was carried by a
tall man, whose face I could not see, because the
light blinded me. Opening the gate, he said slowly,
in my language, 'I see that the pious Hsi P'êng feels
bound to correct my solitude. You have no doubt
come to inspect the garden?'

I recognized the name of one of our consuls and
echoed, baffled, 'The garden?'

The damp path zigzagged as in my childhood.
We entered a library of Eastern and Western books. I recognized, bound in yellow silk, some manuscript
volumes of the Lost Encyclopedia compiled
for the Third Emperor of the Luminous Dynasty
but never printed. A gramophone record still revolved
beside a bronze phoenix. I also remember
a famille rose vase and another, many centuries
older, in that shade of blue copied by our potters
from Persian craftsmen.

Dr Albert watched me, smiling. He was, as I
have said, tall, with sharp features, grey eyes, and
grey whiskers. There was something of the priest
and also the sailor about him. He told me he had
been a missionary in Tientsin 'before aspiring to
become a Sinologist'.

We sat down - I on a long, low divan, he with
his back to the window and to a grandfather clock.
I worked out that my pursuer, Richard Madden,
would not appear for at least an hour. My irrevocable
plan could wait.

'A strange fate, Ts'ui Pên's,' said Stephen Albert.
'Governor of his native province, a learned astronomer
and astrologer, a tireless interpreter of the canonical
books, a chess player, a famous poet and
calligrapher - he gave up everything to write a book
and build a maze. He renounced the pleasures of
oppression, justice, the plural bed, banquets, and
even learning to cloister himself for thirteen years in the Pavilion of Limpid Solitude. Upon his death,
his heirs found nothing but a chaos of manuscripts.
The family, as you must know, wanted to consign
them to the flames, but his executor - a Taoist or
Buddhist monk - insisted on their publication.'

'Ts'ui Pên's blood kin still curse that monk,' I
replied. 'The publication was pointless. The book
is an indecisive pile of contradictory drafts. I have
examined it on a couple of occasions. In the third
chapter the hero dies, in the fourth he is alive. As
for Ts'ui Pên's other enterprise, his labyrinth - '

'A labyrinth of symbols,' he corrected. 'An invisible
labyrinth of time. It has been granted to
me, a barbarous Englishman, to unravel this delicate
mystery. After more than a hundred years, the
details are irrecoverable, but it is not difficult to
surmise what took place. Ts'ui Pên may once have
said, I am retiring to write a book. And on another
occasion, I am retiring to build a maze.
Everyone imagined these to be two works; nobody
thought that book and labyrinth were one and the
same. The Pavilion of Limpid Solitude stood in
the centre of what was perhaps an elaborately laid-out garden. This may have suggested a physical
labyrinth. Ts'ui Pên died, and no one in his vast
domains ever found the labyrinth. The confusion of
the novel suggested to me that it was the labyrinth.
Two facts corroborated this. One, the curious
story that the maze Ts'ui Pên had planned was
specifically infinite. The second, my discovery of
a fragment of a letter.'

Albert got up. For several moments he stood
with his back to me, opening a drawer of the black-and-gold writing cabinet. He turned and held out
a squarish piece of paper that had once been crimson
and was now pink and brittle. The script was
the renowned calligraphy of Ts'ui Pên himself.
Uncomprehending but with deep emotion, I read
these words written with a tiny brush by a man of
my own blood: 'I leave to various futures (but not
all) my garden of branching paths.' In silence, I
handed back the page.

'Before unearthing this letter,' Albert went on,
'I wondered how a book could be infinite. I came
up with no other conclusion than that it would
have to be a cyclical, or circular, volume - one
whose last page was the same as its first, and with
the potential to go round and round for ever. I
recalled the night in the middle of the Thousand
and One Nights, in which Queen Scheherazade - having distracted the scribe by a trick of magic - starts to recount the history of the Thousand and
One Nights, thereby running the risk of coming
back full circle to this same night and continuing
forever more. I also imagined an archetypal, hereditary
work handed down from father to son,
wherein each new heir would add a chapter or,
piously, rewrite a page of his forebears. These
speculations engaged my mind, but none seemed
even remotely relevant to Ts'ui Pên's contradictory
chapters. In my perplexity, I received from Oxford
the manuscript you have just seen. One sentence
caught my attention: I leave to various futures (but
not all) my garden of branching paths. Almost at
once, light dawned. The garden of branching
paths was the chaotic novel; the phrase 'to various
futures (but not all)' conjured up an image of a
branching in time, not in space. A re-reading of
the book confirmed this theory. In all works of
fiction, each time the writer is confronted with
choices, he opts for one and discards the rest. In
the inextricable Ts'ui Pên, he opts - at one and the
same time - for all the alternatives. By so doing,
he creates several futures, several times over, and
in turn these proliferate and branch off. Hence,
his novel's contradictions. Fang, let us say, has a
secret. A stranger calls at his door; Fang decides to kill him. Naturally, there are several possible outcomes.
Fang can kill the intruder, the intruder can
kill Fang, both can be spared, both can die, and so
forth. In Ts'ui Pên's novel, all of these happen, and
each is a point of departure for other branchings
off. Now and again, the paths of this labyrinth
converge. For example, in one possible past you
come to this house as an enemy, in another as a
friend. If you can bear my incurable pronunciation,
we shall read some pages.'

In the bright circle of lamplight, his face was
clearly that of an old man, yet with something
unconquerable and even immortal about it. Slowly,
precisely, he read two forms of the same epic chapter.
In the first, an army marches into battle across
a bare mountain; dread of the rocks and the darkness
makes the troops hold life cheap, and they
easily win a victory. In the second, the same army
storms a palace, which is in the midst of festivities;
the resplendent battle seems to them an extension
of the revelry, and they are victorious. I listened
with seemly veneration to these old tales, which
were perhaps less of a marvel than the fact that
my blood had contrived them and that a man from
a distant empire had restored them to me while I
was engaged in a desperate assignment on an island
in the West. I remember the concluding words, repeated at the end of each version like a secret
watchword: 'So battled the heroes, their stout hearts
calm, their swords violent, each man resigned to
kill and to die.'

From that moment, I felt around me and within
my dark body an invisible, intangible swarming. Not
that of diverging, parallel, and finally converging
armies but a more inaccessible, more intimate turmoil,
which these armies somehow foreshadowed.

'I do not think your illustrious ancestor toyed
idly with different versions,' Stephen Albert went
on. 'I do not consider it likely that he would sacrifice
thirteen years to the endless compilation of a
rhetorical experiment. In your country, the novel
is a lesser genre; at that time, it was a genre that
was not respected. Ts'ui Pên was a novelist of genius,
but he was also a man of letters who certainly did
not look on himself as a mere novelist. The testimony
of his contemporaries proclaims - and his life
confirms - his metaphysical and mystical leanings.
Philosophical argument usurps a good part of
his novel. I know that of all quandaries, none so
troubled or exercised him as the fathomless quandary
of time. But, then, time is the only problem
that does not appear in the pages of his Garden.
He does not even use the word that means time.
How do you explain this deliberate omission?'

I put forward several suggestions, all inadequate.
We discussed them.

'In a riddle about chess,' Stephen Albert concluded,
'what is the one forbidden word?'

I thought for a moment and replied, 'The word
chess.'

'Exactly,' said Albert. 'The Garden of Branching
Paths is a vast riddle, or parable, about time. This
is the hidden reason that prevents Ts'ui Pên from
using the word. To omit a particular word in all
instances, to resort to clumsy metaphors and obvious
circumlocutions, is probably the surest way
of calling attention to it. This was the convoluted
method that the oblique Ts'ui Pên chose in each
meandering of his unrelenting novel. I have studied
hundreds of manuscripts, I have corrected the
mistakes introduced by careless copyists, I have
deduced the plan behind that chaos, I have reestablished - I believe I have re-established - its
original order, and I have translated the whole work.
I can guarantee that he does not use the word
time even once. The explanation is plain - The Garden of Branching Paths is an incomplete but
not false picture of the world as Ts'ui Pên perceived
it. Unlike Newton or Schopenhauer, your ancestor
did not believe in a uniform, absolute time. He
believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing and dizzying web of diverging and converging and
parallel times. This mesh of times that merge, split
apart, break, and for centuries are unaware of each
other, embraces all possibilities. In most of these
times, we do not exist; in some, you exist but not
I; in others, I but not you; in still others, both of
us. In our present time, granted me by a lucky
chance, you have come to my house; in another,
on making your way across the garden, you find
me dead; in still another, I speak these same words,
but I am a delusion, a ghost.'

'In all,' I said, not without a shudder, 'I thank
you and honour you for your re-creation of Ts'ui
Pên's garden.'

'Not in all,' he murmured, smiling. 'Time keeps
branching into countless futures. In one of them, I
am your enemy.'

I felt again that swarming of which I have
spoken. It seemed to me that the dank garden around
the house was utterly saturated with invisible beings.
These were Albert and myself, secret and busy and
in numberless guises, in other dimensions of time.
I lifted my gaze, and the tenuous nightmare fled.
In the yellow and black garden, stood one man
alone. But the man was strong as a statue, and he
was coming towards me down the path. He was
Captain Richard Madden.

'The future is already here,' I replied, 'but I'm
your friend. May I see the letter again?'

Albert got up. Tall, he opened the drawer of the
writing cabinet, and for a moment his back was to
me. I had drawn my revolver. I fired with great
care; Albert collapsed instantly, without a groan. I
swear his death was immediate, a thunderbolt.

The rest is unreal, meaningless. Madden burst
in and seized me. I have been condemned to hang.
Horrible to say, I won. I passed on to Berlin the
secret name of the city to be attacked. Yesterday
the Germans shelled it; I read this in the same newspapers
that reported to all England the curious case
of the learned Sinologist Stephen Albert, who had
been murdered by a perfect stranger, one Yu Tsun.
My commander solved the riddle. He knew that
my dilemma was how - in the noise and confusion
of war - to signal the name of the place to be targeted
and that the only way I could find was to
kill someone named Albert. My superior knows
nothing - nor can anyone - of my unceasing
remorse and weariness.

* An outrageous and despicable suggestion. The Prussian spy
Hans Rabener, alias Viktor Runeberg, drew an automatic pistol
on Captain Richard Madden, the bearer of an arrest warrant. In
self-defence, Madden inflicted wounds from which Runeberg later
died. [Editor's Note.]